


november's year

by jelliebean



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-25
Updated: 2018-05-05
Packaged: 2019-03-09 06:20:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13475505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jelliebean/pseuds/jelliebean
Summary: Steve was wavering, not sure if he should sign up or click the back button, when something Wilson wrote caught his eye.  "I couldn’t stop reliving that moment, when I’d lost him, and I didn’t understand why I was still alive and how the world kept on going when for me, the world had frozen when he fell."Yes.  It hit a chord somewhere in Steve.  Yes.  Before he’d put the plane in the ice.  Before that.  The world had frozen before that.  And no one else seemed to realize.--or--Steve adjusts to the modern world via the internet. In other words, an AU in which Steve meets Tony in a grief/survivor's guilt chat room





	1. Chapter 1

Steve sighed, setting down the shield shaped backpack and taking off his leather jacket.  Small mercies that SHIELD even let him ride a motorcycle to his own apartment.  As if they weren’t also probably making sure his neighbors were SHIELD agents.  Always had to control the circumstances.  He understood it—he’d been a little well, shell-shocked so to speak, coming out of the ice.  And the world was a lot… more complicated than it had been.  He thought about ditching the green Ford Focus he saw  trailing him two blocks behind, but it seemed petty when he knew they must have a tracker on the motorcycle itself anyway.  And they knew where he was going.  Work.  Home.  Work.

Fury had personally escorted him to his new apartment.  He wasn’t sure if that was supposed to be comforting or a threat, a reminder that Fury was the one who put him in the apartment and he’d damn well always know what Steve was doing.  Of course, Fury was also the one who had set him up with his bank account, a little plastic card to get money, walked him down to a SHIELD therapist and told him to get his damn head on right, that a war was coming and he’d better be ready. 

Steve hung his jacket on a peg, running a hand fondly down the sleeve.  Motorcycles seemed to be one of the least-changed items since he’d been dead.  Asleep.  He meant asleep. 

He made some coffee in the little plastic machine, adding a splash of milk and sugar.  He opened the computer that Coulson had given him to help him get acquainted with the world, but remotely.  Safely.  Where he couldn’t do any damage.  Just sitting, in his kitchen, trying to get settled in a world that had moved on. 

Steve sighed again, heavy.  Well.  The therapist said it would help.  Actually, the therapist had stared at him for an hour.  Steve had just sat there.  He didn’t really have anything to say.  He had a lot of questions.  But he didn’t.  It didn’t feel right to just tell someone else everything.  His failures were his own to bear.  And he wasn’t sure what he needed to say to get reacquainted with the world.  Really he wasn’t sure he wanted to get reacquainted with the world.  It had gone on without him.  He was a relic of an age past.  Steve just wasn’t sure there was a place for him in this world.

After an hour, the therapist had told him that he should try a survivor’s guilt message board.  Steve didn’t know if that’s what the therapist told everyone she saw.  After all, it’s not like they’d had a deep conversation about how he was dealing. And he didn’t really think there was a handbook on how to help recently defrosted men from the 1940s readjust to the modern world. She’d mostly just watched him catalogue the titles of the books and try to remember the names of the flowers on the coffee table.  And she’d explained wifi. 

Steve felt slightly guilty about that, but also it rankled him, SHIELD controlling everything he did. He clicked the little icon in the corner.  He was definitely supposed to be connected to that one—SHIELDWIFI08.  Subtle.  He scanned down the list, looking for one that was unsecured. There was one.  Coffeeshop247.  That had to be the little café around the corner.  He liked it.  He’d gotten breakfast there three times already—proper bagels and coffee.  And since he’d already spent money there, he didn’t need to feel bad about using the wifi.  Perfect. 

Steve opened a browser window, searching for a grief counseling group.  Survivor’s guilt, the therapist had said. Steve entered it into the search bar. Fury was at least right in that it was a little better to see what other people had to say, hidden here, behind his computer. Of course, Fury would never let him go to an actual meeting.  SHIELD didn’t want their newest melted mascot to be out in public, talking to everyone.  Not when they couldn’t control it.  Even his hander, Coulson, seemed to be playing things close to the vest, but then he seemed like a devoted acolyte of Fury’s.  So this was the solution.  An online grief counseling group.  Message boards, they said.  Group chats, they said. Maybe a VA meeting in a few months. Maybe.  Coulson seemed to be pushing for it, or Steve thought so, anyway.  But Fury and Hill didn’t seem to feel the same.

Steve browsed the options.  He clicked through a few websites.  Most of them were informational. Fewer hosted groups.  He finally landed on HowtoCarryIt.  The moderator was ex-Air Force, a counselor who seemed to be living what he was teaching. In his photo he had kind eyes.  His bio said that he lost a man on one of his missions.  When he’d come home, he didn’t know how to talk about it. He didn’t know how to reconcile that loss with how the world hadn’t stopped.  And that’s why he founded this site. A message board.  A regularly scheduled groupchat, open to anyone.  He was just in time.   

Steve was wavering, not sure if he should sign up or click the back button, when something Wilson wrote caught his eye.  _I couldn’t stop reliving that moment, when I’d lost him, and I didn’t understand why I was still alive and how the world kept on going when for me, the world had frozen when he fell_.

Yes.  It hit a chord somewhere in Steve.  Yes.  Before he’d put the plane in the ice.  Before that.  The world had frozen before that.  And no one else seemed to realize.

So. A username. Dinosaur? Relic? Leftover? Now he was being macabre. 

Finally he just typed in Cap.  It would work.  Miraculously, it wasn’t already taken.  He wasn’t sure what he should say.  The moderator, Wilson, opened up the chat.  Asked if anyone wanted to share. 

(Mod)Wilson: Thanks for stopping by.  Anyone want to start off?

There was a moment’s pause.  For a long minute Steve thought no one would say anything. Then:

PFCer: Half my unit is gone. And I watched it all happen.  Right off base, right in front of me.  And I was sick that day, couldn’t go on patrol.  Fucking stomach bug.  One minute I got my head in a fucking bucket, dumping my guts, and there’s an explosion, rocked the whole fucking camp.  I shoulda been on that patrol. 

Mel: I hear you. It took years for me to be able to talk about a bad mission I was on.  Lost everyone.  Lost myself. Wouldn’t have helped them for you to be there, you know.

(Mod)Wilson: Mel’s right.  Glad to have you. We’ve all got the same problems here.  Guilt, regret.  We’re listening.

Steve shut the laptop.  He wasn’t ready. 

\---


	2. Chapter 2

For two weeks, Steve lurked.  That was the term.  He signed up, read other people’s grief, their guilt.  And he felt it all.  All these men and women, people he could have saved if he hadn’t gone under. And what was the point of having put down the plane, of having missed out on everything if the world hadn’t really changed at all?

He went to SHIELD.  He read through the carefully curated list of Wikipedia pages, History.com websites. Coulson would send him a list, and he’d read through it in his room, closeted away from the world. In his office, he could see daylight through a small window.  Other offices opened, pure glass over the city, the daylight and the bustle of the city vibrant and near.  His office didn’t have the same access to the world. The world didn’t have access to him.  He wasn’t sure if it was beneficial or not.  He was sure it was intentional.

Steve read a dossier on Natasha Romanoff, Bruce Banner.  The notes said Banner was somewhere in India, rural.  They had tabs on him.  Steve hoped they’d let him be.  If he’d found some peace, they should let him have it. 

They gave him a heavily redacted paper file about a hammer.  Redacted, but not enough.  Clearly they’d found a being of enormous power, capable of near god-like actions. And he’d found himself a girlfriend.  Steve had to smile at that. 

At eleven, he had his hour with the therapist—an hour of oatmeal-colored furniture, grey walls, and the sterile vase of flowers centered on the coffee table. She asked if he wanted to talk about it.  Steve would refuse, politely.  She would say she understood.  He would smile politely.  He wondered, a little, after the destruction in Harlem, if Banner understood.  He wondered if Romanoff would say comforting platitudes about loss, about guilt. About redemption. He wondered if she would believe it.

Lunch was in a cafeteria.  People pointedly averted their eyes in respect.  Or maybe Fury had warned them away.  Either way, it was a quiet existence. Sometimes Steve felt like he’d lose his voice in his silence. 

After lunch, May would escort him to the gym.  He was fairly sure there were cameras, sensors, tracking his performance, his exertion, seeing if his body measured up to Erskine’s notes.  To Banner.  Seeing where his limits were.  He broke a punching bag on the first day.  It was replaced when he returned.  He broke the replacement. They set him on an indoor running track. They said it was to help him train.  So they could increase the speed, change the settings. Keep him agile. Steve was pretty sure it was so he couldn’t go running around in public, where anyone could see him.  Where his interactions wouldn’t be carefully scripted.  But he didn’t complain.  He did understand.  He was a liability.

Coulson had dropped a plate on his way into Steve’s office in that first week and Steve had upended his desk and dragged Coulson behind it before he realized the crash was just broken ceramic.  He was dangerous.  He understood. 

So he trained, and he read, and he listened. 

And every night he went home and made dinner, using another of Coulson’s carefully curated lists. He made a cup of coffee, weak, but comforting.  Then, signing onto the café’s wifi, he checked the message board.  Sometimes Sam would post something, or a new voice would join the chat.  Sometimes there was nothing new.  He would read one of the books that Coulson had carefully chosen as fun reading—works he’d known from before, classics he’d never had the time or money to read, modern novels.

He felt like Okonkwo. Like Frodo, at the Grey Havens, left behind and adrift. 

At night, he’d dream.  Peggy. Beautiful, vibrant, in red.  In uniform.  “Come back to me,” she’d say, in an empty dance hall. In a bombed out French bar.  In a graveyard, mist trailing at the bottom of her hem.

A train in the Alps, the cold seeping into his bones.  Bucky, falling, over and over.  Clinging to his hand.  Sometimes, Steve would be the one falling, but Bucky would catch him, catch him, as if to say, _this is how easy it is_ , and then Steve would be back on the train and Bucky would be falling again. “Guess you always were too much of a little guy,” he’d say.  “I thought I could trust you.”

His body would be burning, Erskine’s serum running through his veins. 

“Why didn’t you save me?” Erskine would ask, bleeding out.  “I gave you everything.”

In his dreams, they died. They all died.  Erskine, Bucky, Peggy. His mother.  The Commandoes, all of them. He was drowning in corpses, the people he couldn’t save.  Over and over.

“Why did it have to be you?” Phillips would ask, disgusted, becoming Schmidt, becoming Bucky, while Steve’s body gradually turned to ice, surrendered to the chill of the Atlantic. “Why did it have to be you?”

He’d wake, sitting up ramrod straight.  The lights from the neon beyond his windows were too bright, the reds and oranges, the blues, like the phosphorescence of bombs, the crimson of blood, the blue of the tesseract. 

Sometimes he’d wake to a car backfiring.  Sometimes to nothing at all.  He’d sit, not breathing. His chest felt like it was cracking, like whatever was inside him might spill over and it was his, his guilt, his fault. There was no one else.  These were Steve’s nightmares, his history, his past.  This was his record, blemished and tattered, and the blame was his alone. 

When he could, he slept again.  Most nights, he made coffee in the little plastic machine and sat at his round kitchen table, listening to the tick of the plastic clock they’d bought him, afraid he wouldn’t be able to use his phone, the way the modern world had learned.  He’d go through what he’d read during the day.  He knew the next fight was coming.  He was a weapon, a soldier.  As far as SHIELD was concerned, he was engineered to get blood on his hands.

\--

Steve hadn’t been able to sleep all night.  At 10am precisely, Coulson walked into Steve’s office, holding a stack of thick manila files.

“You know, there’s a fair amount of irony in this.  Considering whose file this is. But there’s just something about the feel of manila.  It feels right. This is the way a file should feel,” Coulson rambled, smiling.  He stopped in front of Steve’s desk.  “This one. This is the big guy.  He’s been through a lot.  Cut him a little slack, will you? He’s a good guy.  Hides it well. But when all the cards are on the table, well…” He set the packet down with a hefty thump. “I hear you knew his dad.  I think this one’s an upgrade.”

Steve opened the first file as Coulson closed the door.  Stark, Anthony E.

Howard.  Howard didn’t figure prominently in Steve’s dreams. They’d never been close. Howard was too young, too arrogant, back when they’d known each other, to be a good father. But he had been a genius, that’s for sure.  If this Anthony was an upgrade, he had to be incredible. He started to peruse the file.  A young kid, the same curly hair and big eyes.  On the cover of _Time_. Featured in _Popular Mechanics_. Graduating from MIT. Early. With multiple degrees. 

Tabloids. Drugs, alcohol. Scandals.

Everything about him, Tony Stark, was so bright, so flashy. He was everything that Steve struggled with in the modern world.  So quick, so casual.  A flippant smile and wink to the cameras, false daylight.  Steve had enough practice with the press on the USO tours to know a fake smile when he saw it.  He wondered what it covered. He wondered if Tony remembered what it covered, if it ate at him, like it ate at Steve.

He was only halfway through the stack when he was summoned to the therapist.

He was, if it was possible, more distant in this session than in the previous ones.  He wondered if she would tell Coulson.  He wondered if he should care.

At lunch, he brought his tray back to his office. Tony was a young CEO. A brilliant engineer, taking Stark Industries easily into the modern era.  He shored up contracts from the government, private companies. The weapons division grew, as it had under Howard.  He only had a single, thick file left when May came to collect him. 

After he burned through one bag, after he’d gone through his paces in the gym, he showered and returned to his office. The files were still sitting in a neat pile on his desk. He’d been Fury’s good boy all along, never fighting, not a rebellious move.  He took Stark’s last file and slipped it under his leather jacket.  He’d finish reading it at home.

\--

(Mod)Wilson: Thanks for stopping by.  Anyone want to start off?

JustaShell: Someone else died.  And it should have been me.  It should have been me.  I’m the one who deserved it.  He died so I didn’t have to.  How do I live with that?

Steve stared at the screen blankly, picturing a cliff, picturing snow.  How do I live with that? He’d tried not to, when it came down to it.  The best laid plans.  He could still taste the shitty whiskey he’d found at the bar.  Peggy. Always competent. Always focused. It hadn’t really helped him.  It had been over since that day anyway.  But it couldn’t hurt to pass along advice.

Cap: A friend told me to ask myself if I respected that person, and if so, to respect and honor their decisions.  Give their sacrifice dignity.  Because that person believed in you. That you were worth saving.  Don’t know if it will help. 

(Mod)Wilson: Hey there, Cap.  That’s some good advice. We know what it feels like, to be left behind.  But if someone feels like you are worth saving, it’s a good place to start.  To make their faith in you real.

JustaShell: I’m trying.  But it’s hard to live up to that kind of standard.  He thought I could be someone better than I am.  He believed I could change… the world, practically.

Mel: Sounds like a lot of pressure.  Just remember you’ve got friends. We’re here to listen.

Steve sat back.  He’d never posted before. He’d never contributed to the conversation. It felt like a risk.  It felt like overexposure.  Giving away his hand, somehow.  But it also felt right, passing on Peggy’s advice. As if it had never really been his, never really been for him, as if he’d been given it to hold onto, for a while, a transient snippet from an older world, until he could deliver it to this new recipient.  He watched the rest of the conversation.  Mel and Wilson stepping in, providing guidance.  JustaShell didn’t say anything more, and the group moved on.  Eventually, the conversation stopped.  When Steve closed the window, his eyes were heavy.  He’d finish the file tomorrow.

For the first time since he came out of the ice, Steve slept the night through.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know, I'm super slow. Also, I don't have a beta, so all the mistakes are completely mine. But, like most needy, insecure authors, I live for comments.


End file.
